Community Economy Return on Investment

Description

Gibson‐Graham et al. :

"A community economy is built upon ethical investments—in surviving well, distributing surplus, responsibly encountering others, consuming sustainably, and sharing our planetary commons, all with a view to the wellbeing of future more‐than‐human generations (Gibson‐Graham, 2006). In Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Gibson‐Graham et al. (2013) proposed the Community Economy Return on Investment (CEROI) as a mechanism for tracking and valuing the creation of ethical economies. Community economy “returns” include both social benefits such as increased forms of individual, household and community well‐being, as well as ecological benefits such as a reduced ecological footprint. They also include increased collectively controlled surplus, increased ethical trade, and expanded commons.

The CEROI tool provides a guide for the method we devised for calculating the value of the R‐Urban commons. This tool provides a way of distinguishing how the R‐Urban intervention specifically enabled commoning and the emergence of ethical economic and ecological relations. We use actual and estimated amounts of money, admittedly the dominant metric of value in the capitalist economy (Dyer‐Witheford in Bollier, 2016a, p. 23), to represent the value of urban commoning (Bauwens in Bollier, 2016a, p. 2). Our innovation is to deploy this metric to account for the incredible volume of value that can be returned on an investment in commoning." (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eet.1890)